Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Love and Jealousy

(Theme song that was going through my head while writing this : Love Song by Tesla - you may want to listen while you read)

“"Love" is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy." - Robert Heinlein

“To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self” - Joan Didion

"Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"Jealousy is the fear of comparison." - Max Frisch

"Jealousy is the grave of affection." - Mary Baker Eddy

"Jealousy is the jaundice of the soul." - John Dryden

"The surest route to breeding jealousy is to compare. Since jealousy comes from feeling less than another, comparisons only fan the fires." - Dorothy Corkville Briggs

"Jealousy is simply and clearly the fear that you do not have value. Jealousy scans for evidence to prove the point - that others will be preferred and rewarded more than you. There is only one alternative - self-value. If you cannot love yourself, you will not believe that you are loved." - Jennifer James

"Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code - family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy,… restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, etcetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an “obscene” sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in thecode itself rather than the failure to abide by the code." - - Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein

Okay, so I started and ended with Heinlein quotes. The main goal of this post is to promote Love without Jealousy. I think of this as pure love - untainted by jealousy or a sense of possession. If "Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own," then how would denying someone happiness or joy be love? The idea that "you can not experience joy with someone else" is imprisonment.

Think seriously about this, please. Jealousy is the dread that you will miss out on something, that you will 'loose.' It is a taint on the ideal of Love.

It is my feeling and belief that Monogamy is a construct of oppression and repression. It places importance on possession, control and restraint while condemning any interest in any other person. This enshrinement of one relationship as the be-all end-all of life fulfillment is absolutely absurd. Humans are not a monogamous species!

"Studies conservatively estimate, Vaughan reveals, that 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women will have an affair."

The author in the previously cited work declares that "everyone is at risk for betraying or being betrayed." Therein lies the heart of the matter at hand - betrayal. When people accept that beings as complex as ourselves are going to require more than one partner, sexual or otherwise, to fulfill our life, there will be no more "betrayal."

I would like to make it clear that I am not suggesting a lack of commitment in relationships. Quite the contrary! Commitment is the backbone of any lasting relationship. The ideals that I have always sought are encompassed in a movement called Polyamory. It is essentially a practice of Love and Intimacy with multiple partners. Please take note that Sex is not a required part of neither intimacy nor love. Poly has been around since the 90's as a formal term, but the practice has been around since the beginning of time, I believe. It has been making the news sort of recently.

The following is taken from the news article :

Some polyamorists are married with multiple love interests, while others practice informal group marriage. Some have group sex—and many are bisexual—while those like Greenan have a series of heterosexual, one-on-one relationships. Still others don't identify as poly but live a recognizably poly lifestyle. Terisa describes her particular cluster as a "triad," for the number of people involved, and a "vee" for its organization, with Terisa at the center (the point of the V) and her two primary partners, Scott and Larry (who are not intimate with each other) as the tips of each arm. Other poly vocabulary exists, too: "spice" is the plural of "spouse"; "polygeometry" is how a polyamorous group describes their connections; "polyfidelitous" refers to folks who don't date outside their menage; and a "quad" is a four-member poly group.

I understand why many outsiders want to know about the sex arrangements, but I really wish that sex was not discussed along with Poly all the time. Intimacy does not require sex. Sure, sex can enhance intimacy, but it can also distract from it. No matter how many times someone who is Poly says "Its not about the sex", no one who has not lived it will easily get past the "Sex." It could be because of the extreme hangup society places on people.

But perhaps the practice is more natural than we think: a response to the challenges of monogamous relationships, whose shortcomings—in a culture where divorce has become a commonplace—are clear. Everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: can one person really satisfy every need? Polyamorists think the answer is obvious—and that it's only a matter of time before the monogamous world sees there's more than one way to live and love. "The people I feel sorry for are the ones who don't ever realize they have any other choices beyond the traditional options society presents," says Scott.

Poly relationships may not always be easy, no relationship is, but in the long run, I truly feel as though they are easier than the current model of enforced monogamy.

In Peace and Spirit Be!

(Theme song that was going through my head while writing this : Love Song by Tesla)